Japan’s birthrate is low. But why?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post was inspired by some comments in today’s open thread.]

The Japanese are failing to reproduce in anywhere near replacement numbers. The population is therefore skewing older, and it has a negative effect on the economy already. It’s been well-documented that this is happening. But why?

Here’s a 2017 article from The Atlantic that attempts to tackle the question:

The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the United States: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” says Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University…

The article goes on to say that Japan’s workforce used to have stable, lifelong jobs, but now a great many workers are what’s called “irregular”:

According to Kingston, the rise of irregular workers in Japan began in the 1990s, when the government revised labor laws to enable the wider use of temporary and contract workers hired by intermediary firms. Then, as globalization put more pressure on companies to cut costs, they increasingly relied on a temporary workforce, a trend that intensified during the Great Recession…

In a culture that places such an emphasis on men being breadwinners, this has serious implications for marriage and childbearing. Men who don’t have regular jobs are not considered desirable marriage partners; even if a couple wants to get married, and both have irregular jobs, their parents will likely oppose it…

Women seeking full-time work frequently find themselves in irregular jobs too, which also has implications for raising a family, because the hours are unpredictable and the pay is low. But it is more of an obstacle for marriage if a man doesn’t have a good job—roughly 70 percent of women quit working after they have their first child, and depend on their husband’s salary for some time.

So there’s a cultural lag between expectations based on the past, and present-day economic realities in Japan. And of course, when women work, they don’t need a husband to survive (especially if they’re living alone in those tiny apartments featured in today’s open thread).

And then there’s the situation of the nature of the “good” jobs:

Knowing that people in their 20s and 30s are desperate to get regular jobs, companies hire lots of young people and force them to work long hours for little to no overtime pay, assuming that most won’t be able to survive the harsh conditions, Konno said. Japan has long had a culture of overwork—there’s even a Japanese word, karoshi, for death by overwork—but Konno says that it has worsened since the Great Recession…

The result is that even Japan’s “good” jobs can be brutal. People who hold them may earn enough money to support families, but they often don’t have much time to date, or to do anything but work, sleep, and eat.

Of course, that was also true long ago (and even today to some extent) of the upward-striving poor in the US. Many of our ancestors worked round the clock and barely had time to see their children. But they still had children (birth control being an iffy proposition at the time), and their hope and dream was of a better life for those children.

I think the Japanese – and to a lesser extent, young people in the Western world in general – have somewhat lost that dream.

I wrote a post in 2017 on the Japanese aversion among younger generations to sex itself – that is, sex between two actual people. In it I linked to this article:

Nearly a third of Japanese people are entering their 30s without any sexual experience, according to research.

The country is facing a steep population decline as a growing number of youngsters abstain from sex and avoid romantic relationships.

So it’s certainly not just reluctance to marry. In the article’s interviews with young Japanese, some men said they fear rejection if they ask a woman for a date, and a woman cited the ready availability of porn that some men substitute for the risks (emotional and otherwise) inherent in sex between two people.

Whatever it is – and I think the phenomenon is multiply-determined and hardly limited to Japan, although Japan may be the canary in the reproductive coalmines – it is an ominous sign.

Happy New Year’s Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I’m trying to relax. I don’t have a hangover because I don’t drink, although I had my customary thimbleful of champagne last night. I don’t have any resolutions because I’ve learned over the years that I break them quickly. So why make a liar out of myself?

But it’s nice to have that fresh clean slate anyway. January 1st!

Belief systems: Proving or disproving AGW

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Richard Aubrey writes:

Looking at such belief systems from the outside is puzzling. Is it that the individual believes in certain things? Or is it that the individual believes in BELIEVING, irrespective of factual difficulties?

From time to time I’ll recommend looking at Watts Up With That, WUWT, a warming denial website. Read their stuff, figure out why they’re wrong. Simple enough, right? Right? Oh, no. Not going to read that.

Aubrey makes two different points there. One is especially valid, I think – which is that the refusal to even look at and read a least some dissenting views is a sign of a mind that is closed. I’ve read the case for many things in which I don’t believe, and even if I often find them unconvincing I think it’s important to at least take a look.

Which brings us to the second point. With AGW, I’ve read reams and reams on both sides, and I am unable to come to a conclusion for the simple reason that both sides rely on figures and methods that I can’t evaluate in the way I can evaluate less esoteric information. For example, I can say for AGW that I believe models will always leave out important aspects and therefore are suspect. But that doesn’t tell me whether AGW is really occurring or not. So the most I ever can say is that I think the jury is out, and that for me the most reliable-seeming source has been Judith Curry. I find her perspective fair, open-minded, and refreshing.

But I can’t prove anyone right or wrong in this debate. I don’t have the training, and neither do the vast vast majority of people.

That’s where the “consensus” argument comes in for those who believe. Whether or not there really is such consensus, and if so how complete it is and how much politics enters into it (I think a great deal), the point I’m trying to make is that for many people, seeming consensus or claimed consensus good enough. Their reasoning goes something like this: “I’m not a scientist and can’t figure it out myself, but if most scientists agree then I think it’s probably true.”

You can get into arguments about whether “consensus” in science matters, and how many things were once agreed on by most scientists and have turned out to be incorrect as far as we know today. But this post is not about that; it’s about how most people (or certainly many people) evaluate scientific hypotheses and come to believe or disbelieve in them.

COVID tests

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Griffin” writes:

And I know it’s tempting to criticize the administration for not supplying ample amounts of tests but that is the wrong approach also.

Tests are how this goes on forever so by criticizing them now you are just setting them up for a win when they produce 40 gazillion tests in a month.

My response? Yes and no.

Yes, tests yield cases, and cases have been the wrong metric for a long long time now. Tests also might play into the increased number of hypochondriacal people who want to test themselves all the time.

But the administration will claim a win no matter what happens, and the MSM will back them up and their supporters will believe. It doesn’t really have to reflect reality. So whether we criticize the administration or not is somewhat irrelevant, I think.

What’s more, home tests are really helpful. Over a month ago I was visiting my grandkids and caught a very nasty bug. In fact, I’m still recovering a month later, although I’m nearly 100% now. But I had symptoms that seemed to point to COVID: sore throat and runny nose, insistent cough, exhaustion, and chills and fever. I think for a while I also didn’t really taste much, and my appetite was decreased. The fever, which was somewhat low-grade much of the time although sometimes higher, lasted nearly two weeks, which was highly unusual for me and quite alarming.

I had access to a home test through a relative, and it was a wonderful thing to be able to avoid waiting in line with other sick people, and also being able to find out quite quickly whether I tested positive or not. The test was negative, and I took another a couple of weeks later – negative also. I’ve had friends exposed to COVID who had to wait many days for test results and missed important family events because of it.

So I do think it would be a great thing on a personal level if people had access to such tests. How they use them is their business, I suppose.

One other thing – the more tests available, the easier testing is for even the asymptomatic hypochondriacal among us, the more people will test positive and will perhaps be able to relax and live more normally, knowing they now have good immunity for COVID. Or am I giving people way too much credit?

RIP Betty White

The New Neo Posted on by

Betty White died just a couple of weeks short of her 100th birthday, and as far as I can tell she was healthy to the end and died in her sleep. Here’s a fairly comprehensive piece about her life.

White was a fixture on TV for many decades, and she had great great dimples. I first remember her from the show “Password,” which I loved as a child, and then “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” where she played the sweetly venomous Sue Ann. Then of course “Golden Girls.”

From the article:

“I’m the luckiest person in the world. My life is divided in absolute half: half animals, half show business,” White once told TV Guide. “I have to stay in show business to pay for my animal work!”

RIP.

Mugged by reality? Not so fast

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep wondering whether many people who voted for Biden still would vote for him again.

Yes, I know that his approval ratings are low, particularly with conservatives and independents. But among Democrats, he still has majority approval, although it’s dropped:

Among Democrats, Biden’s approval rating in the spring stood in the mid-90s, but in several recent polls, it has fallen into the low 80s. The drop among self-identified liberals was even bigger—just 66 percent approved of the president’s performance in a recent Monmouth poll, compared with 88 percent in April…

To investigate the roots of Biden’s Democratic discontent, I ventured to pockets of Brooklyn where his 2020 vote was nearly unanimous…

What I found among this heavily white, mostly college-educated set was not so much anger as ennui. When I asked co-op members how they thought Biden was doing, the most common response was a sigh and a one-word “Fine” that sounded more exasperated than enthusiastic. “He’s up against a lot,” Jennifer Percival, a 42-year-old speech pathologist, told me. “We’re just trying to hang in there with him.”

My thoroughly unscientific survey uncovered no mass exodus from Biden’s corner in Park Slope. Some progressives said he had even exceeded their expectations, citing an agenda that was more ambitious than Biden had initially campaigned on, as well as the passage of the COVID relief bill and the more recent bipartisan infrastructure package. Others blamed the media for the president’s unpopularity and noted that much of what ails Biden—the COVID resurgence, inflation, Democratic infighting—is out of his control…

Of the 20 people who agreed to be interviewed over the course of an afternoon, not one said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. But there were more subtle shifts that offered hints of a broader trend that national polls could be detecting. A few progressives said they were unsure about Biden’s performance, after being much more supportive in the spring, and many others said they approved of the president but felt less hopeful about him—and about the country—than they did earlier in the year.

I find this extraordinary but unsurprising. A mind is a very very very difficult thing to change.

The author of that piece went to poorer black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, too, and the story was similar, although:

…[T]hey were quicker to voice ambivalence or dissatisfaction in his performance…

…But multiple Democrats in East Flatbush brought up student loans, saying they were disappointed that the president had not acted to forgive them, as progressives like Warren have lobbied him to.

Lisa Ellison, 48 and a home-health aide, described her opinion of Biden as “borderline.” “Everything he said he was going to do for us he hasn’t done,”

So much of the disapproval among Democrats is probably because he’s not leftist enough, or at least not successfully leftist enough.

My own very informal and extremely incomplete polling has been similar. Biden is “fine,” said the one person I asked.

However, in terms of local politics rather than national, I was talking to two family members who are residents of a bluer-than-blue city that’s been having enormous crime increases, and both spontaneously brought up that fact and complained bitterly and at length. I found it interesting, though, that they didn’t seem to connect this to leftist Democratic rule. I didn’t ask them point blank, but – knowing them well – I’m convinced that they would never even consider voting for a Republican or a conservative.

As Zell Miller said, for some people political identity is “like a birthmark.” I wrote about that in a post back in 2005, and I added:

…[A] liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity–it’s also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence–oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals–at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.

My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.

Twas ever thus. I would revise one thing about that passage, though – for whatever reason, my attempts to talk politics with friends are not usually met with rage anymore, although it happens on occasion. Perhaps I no longer even try to talk with those who would be likely to fly off the handle, or perhaps they’re mostly used to me by now.

Those Whitmer kidnapping defendants and proving entrapment

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Bauxite” writes in the Whitmer entrapment thread:

If the facts show that the feds sought out these defendants because they were weak and vulnerable, that will increase my sympathy for them. They will still have a very tough task proving entrapment as a defense.

Agreed, because – as I’ve written before – despite the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, entrapment is an affirmative defense that must be proven by defendants, and which requires a high burden be met: not only that the government introduced the idea for the crime, but also that the defendant was not already willing or predisposed to commit the crime. It seems very difficult to prove that latter part of the standard, and therefore the situation is ripe for government abuse.

As I also have written before, long ago when I was in law school, entrapment disturbed me very much. It was clear that the law had been used to frame and abuse people, and at the time the left agreed because back then it was mainly the left who’d been the targets in recent years.

Bauxite continues:

If a private citizen or group sought out weak and vulnerable accomplices for a criminal enterprise in the same way that the FBI did here, the accomplices would have behaved in exactly the same way as these defendants, yet there would be no entrapment defense for them. I doubt that there would be any serious argument that these hypothetical private accomplices should be acquitted.

Even with totally private actors, defendants who are only tangentially involved sometimes do get off. What’s more, with private actors the evidence is more difficult to obtain, because – unlike with FBI participation – things are not ordinarily recorded. The FBI makes sure it has evidence, and what’s more it knows the required elements of any crime. This gives it a great advantage, especially over young and naive “plotters.”

Bauxite adds:

I completely agree that it matters, and matters a great deal, that the Whitmer defendants were led astray by the government rather than by a private criminal. But that doesn’t mean that the Whitmer defendants didn’t choose to commit a crime.

I don’t have time to go back and read all the articles I’ve already read about the Whitmer kidnapping defendants, but here’s some more background [my emphasis]:

He was referred to as “Captain Autism,” the accused ringleader in the alleged plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

But with a nickname like that, the defense argues, it’s clear the man’s codefendants didn’t take him seriously, or believe that he could commit a crime — like hatch a plan to snatch and kill the governor.

That was entirely the FBI’s doing, the defense maintains, not Adam Fox’s.

“No one would have conspired with Adam Fox because no one believed he had any ability to form, much less carry out, a plan,” the defense argues in a new court filing that outlines how it plans to fight the government in the upcoming trial that highlights the growth of extremism in America.

With the trial three months away, the defense this week asked the court for permission to let jurors hear 258 statements that it believes will prove the FBI planted the kidnapping idea in the suspects’ heads, egged them on with hateful comments about Whitmer and her COVID-19 mandates, and choreographed all the events that led to their arrests at a warehouse in October 2020.

Plus, not only were they drawn into a plot that the government appears to have wholly concocted, they were barely “participants” at all. in the sense of committing a crime. What crime was committed here? Kidnapping conspiracy – because little actually happened except what the FBI did. Yada yada yada talk talk talk.

More [emphasis mine]:

Prosecutors say the men cased Whitmer’s vacation house at night, planned to blow up a nearby bridge to slow down police, drew up a map and bought night goggles, and talked about taking her out on a boat and stranding her in Lake Michigan — and even scooping her up in a helicopter and flying her away to some unidentified location.

None of that is believable, the defense has argued, maintaining that the defendants were merely engaged in tough talk and fantasy play, and had no real plan to harm the governor. The FBI hatched the kidnapping idea, and used paid informants to manipulate the defendants into carrying out a scheme that they never came up with or agreed to be a part of, the defense maintains.

Among the statements the defense wants the jury to hear is a comment that an FBI agent made while interrogating an undercover informant from Wisconsin who had embedded himself in the group.

“We have a saying in my office. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,” the agent allegedly said in the Dec. 10, 2020 conversation. The defense said this comment shows the FBI disregarded the defendants’ “unequivocal objections” to a kidnap plan.…

The defense also wants jurors to hear a comment from one of Fox’s codefendants, Ty Garbin, who in July 2020 allegedly said, “Captain Autism can’t make up his mind.”…

The defense also wants jurors to hear statements that it says show the suspects were opposed to the kidnapping scheme.

“Perhaps none is more direct than a statement by (defendant) Daniel Harris, who told the lead informant and others: ‘No snatch and grab. I swear to …God.'”

The defense also wants jurors to hear a July 7, 2020, conversation, when someone in the group of defendants said they were “not cool with offensive kidnapping” and others agreed.

The defendants face the possibility of life imprisonment on these charges.

It’s a funny thing – and I don’t mean funny ha-ha – how the very same principles and concerns that made me a liberal long ago makes me a conservative by the standards of today.

What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually do much of anything on New Year’s Eve, although I used to always try to watch the ball go down on TV. Staying up late is no problem for me, since I’m a night owl and always have been.

This year I’m going to continue my tradition and not do much of anything in the evening, and this year I bet a lot more people than usual will be doing the same. I plan to drink a tiny toast to the end of 2021, a year I’m pretty sure most people are not going to look back at with fondness.

But even when young, I had an aversion to New Year’s Eve. The idea of a night when you were supposed to have fun or else. The reminder of the speedy passage of time. The drinking. The obligatory midnight kiss, which wasn’t a fun moment if you didn’t like your date.

Once or twice I went to Times Square to see the ball go down in person. Curiously, those were some of my better New Year’s Eves. Maybe it was the people I was with those nights. We ate at Tad’s Steaks, just for laughs, but Tad’s wasn’t bad at all.

And two years ago the very last Tad’s in New York City closed down. I had no idea any of them had lasted that long.

So let’s drink to Tad’s:

The cafeteria-style chophouse is known for hawking inexpensive meat-and-potato dinners on red trays — meals that cost little more than $1 each when the first one opened in 1957. A steak lunch today can be had for as little as $9.

At its height, Tad’s had eight New York locations out of 28 nationwide. But come Jan. 5, 2020, the red neon sign in the window advertising “broiled” steaks at 761 Seventh Ave. will go dark — as will the vast grill that played host to smoky “steak shows,” where dozens of cuts could be grilled at once during the thick of lunch hour.

Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to a wonderful 2022, full of love, joy, and good health!

[NOTE: Some of this appeared in a previous post.]

Buh-bye, de Blasio

The New Neo Posted on by

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Before I read this article on de Blasio’s leavetaking, I had forgotten that he got his big break in 2013 when frontrunner Anthony Weiner imploded in a sexting scandal. That may help a little to explain how New Yorkers elected de Blasio, but why they re-elected him is a bigger mystery. And yes, I know it’s a deep blue city. But still.

When I read this sentence – “During his first inauguration speech, de Blasio pledged a ‘dramatic new approach’ to running the world’s greatest city” – I misread it briefly as “de Blasio pledged a “traumatic new approach'”, which I think fits a lot better.

The article goes on to list de Blasio’s failures.

Let’s see what new mayor Eric Adams will do.